So many small business owners do business door to door or at a retail level that we often find selling “on the road” and sending customers invoices is a two tiered process – one sells at the customer premise and then later creates an invoice in Quickbooks to email or mail to the customer.

InvoiceASAP.com is an app for the iPhone (coming soon on Android) that allows small business owners to create an invoice “on the spot.” So salespeople can sell door to door, consultants can create an “instant invoice,” and quite frankly – small businesses can get paid faster.

Why I like it: In consulting or professional services (legal, accounting, marketing) the customer being serviced may know what the invoice is about, but by the time that customer’s accounting department receives it, questions like, “what is this for?” often arise. This delays the invoice being processed by the customer until phone calls or email inquiries to the serviced customer get answered. Example:

“What is this invoice for Bob? It just says ‘Legal Services.'”

“Oh yeah Linda. I think it was for the trademark we filed. How much is it again?”

Adding voice recordings and pics to invoices is a brilliant move.

Invoice ASAP lets you attach a voice recording where one can record a description of rendered services, or attach pictures of delivered items (here’s my truck unloading your styrofoam cups to your office). This one feature alone should go a long way in eliminating those “what is this invoice about again?” delays.

What I don’t like: To charge $7 a month for an application is a nice “small biz friendly price,” but why charge us $3 more a month for a Quickbooks integrated version? Double entry is still double the work – if one is already paying $7 a month, it seems a bit chintzy to not offer this integration for a premium product release.

$3 more a month for Quickbooks integration? Really?

Upshot: Beautifully detailed invoices generated, sent and saved to the “Cloud” by a mobile phone is not just a cool app, it’s one that potentially shortens the time from services to paid-status, and for so many small businesses that live on a capital crunch, this is a potentially mission-critical application. And who said the iPhone was not for business?

Would adding your picture make it harder for the customer not to pay your invoice?

* I predict as such services become more commonplace, an integration to mobile payment devices like Square are coming… and credit card companies will begin taking a look at such services to reduce the charge-back schemes done by unscrupulous customers.